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Out of the first series of public lectures titled (Re)membering Kenya organised by the Volume editors together with Twaweza Communications and supported by the Goethe Institut Kenya, The Ford Foundation and the Institute for International Education, and whose key outcome was the publication of Remembering Kenya Vol.1 (2010) grew a second round of lecture series. The second series took cognisance of the fact that the problems that bedevil Kenya as a nation go far beyond questions of culture and identity that Volume 1 dealt with. Thus, the second presentations revolved mainly around issues of economics, governance and power. The awareness of the role and/or lack of equity and social justice in...
First published in 1973. This is volume 3 1969, of the Annual Survey of African Law. It includes papers, articles and discussions that are split into sections on Commonwealth African countries and Francophonic African Countries, and other African countries, as well as a listing of cases and statutes.
This book contains the text of two memoranda submitted by the author to the Kenyan government in response to a request by the government seeking clarification on issues of the laws of Matrimony and Succession in the Shi'a faith; and two memoranda submitted by the author to the Tanzanian government in response to Uniform Marriage Law and Hijab; It also contains a note on the Kadhi court in Tanzania.
The title of Susan Hirsch's study of disputes involving Swahili Muslims in coastal Kenya reflects the image of gender relations most commonly associated with Islamic law. Men need only "pronounce" divorce to resolve marital conflicts, while embattled and embittered wives must persevere by silently enduring marital hardships. But Hirsch's observations of Islamic courts uncover how Muslim women actively use legal processes to transform their domestic lives, achieving victories on some fronts but reinforcing their image as subordinate to men through the speech they produce in court. Pronouncing and Persevering focuses closely on the language used in disputes, particularly how men and women narrate their claims and how their speech shapes and is shaped by gender hierarchy in postcolonial Swahili society. Based on field research and court testimony, Hirsch's book debunks the conventional view that women are powerless under Islamic law and challenges the dichotomies through which Islam and gender relations are currently understood.
Okot p'Bitek's epic poem, Song of Lawino, debates Acholi customs around the time that Uganda became independent. This book presents seminal anthropological works from that period by p'Bitek himself and by Frank Girling, who was researching among the Acholi when p'Bitek was a teenager. They were both introduced to anthropology in Oxford by Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, and they both faced difficulties writing up their fieldwork. Girling, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, was a suspected communist activist, and was expelled from Uganda in 1950. Against the odds, he managed to complete his doctorate, but the Colonial Office demanded cuts to the published version. Okot p'Bitek is a famous African creative writer, but his engaging anthropological studies have been unjustly neglected. He found academic ideas about Africans taught at Oxford misconceived and offensive. He rejected established analytical approaches and, consequently, the university failed his doctorate in 1970."
Contested States examines how hegemony is created and facilitated through law as well as how people use legal arenas to resist oppression. The essays, written by anthropologists and historians, offer rich historical and ethnographic detail as they engage these themes in such contexts as: colonial and post-colonial courts in Kenya, India, Uganda and the Caribbean; bureaucracies in Tonga and Turkey; and judicial processes in the historical and contemporary United States. Contested States contributes to the new focus on power and social process in legal studies and argues that while states encode and enforce law, a crucial part of the power of law is its very contestability. The book demonstrates that theoretical insights learned in legal arenas can deepen one's overall understanding of sociocultural order and the processes of historical and legal change.
This book explains when and why governments around the world take action to advance - or undermine - women's rights.